This blog is about breaking the rules.
Sounds edgy, doesn't it? Maybe even a bit in-your-face devil-may-care not-if-I-see-you-first in an anarcho-pretentious-punk-rock-cynic kinda way. But that's not what we're about. And we're also not about clichés, as in the cliché, "Love breaks all the rules." Because let's face it, half the time we don't even know what that's supposed to mean, and much of the time it just ain't true.
So when we say that this blog is about breaking the rules, we don't mean thumbing our noses at society or reveling in tacky or tactless self-indulgence. Sure there's a place for that — we appreciate a good nose-thumbing as much as the next guy. But what this blog is mostly about is who we are, why we're in love, and how we plan to celebrate that love with our family and friends. See, not so edgy, right?
But we do live life on the edge. Rules of all kinds set boundaries and thresholds, and life brings us face to face with those liminal spaces just beyond the pale. From a place of civilized safety, we gaze out into the wilds. Life is full of edges.
In many ways, that's how marriage feels to us: a new frontier, a new threshold to cross, a new way of life beckoning. We each as individuals, Jeff and I, have our own interior landscapes — the landscapes of our souls, our psyches, our hearts and our heads — and those landscapes have their well-trodden paths and their bustling social centers, but they also have wildernesses of their own, places strange and fey and as yet unexplored. How can two people commit to loving each other for the rest of their lives, when they're still in the process of discovering who they are?
We think it's possible. Love may not always break all the rules, but it has a way of breaking down boundaries, and overcoming distances. Our relationship began as an online correspondence over more than five hundred miles and three years ago. When it started, Jeff was just an older man with a wife and kids. I was just a young woman full of ambition and heartache. Both of us were bloggers, and Druids, with a penchant for antiauthoritarian peacemaking and a bit of tree-hugging on the side. Two years, one divorce and many quiet nights of solitude later, it had hardly occurred to either of us that a bit of romance was just around the next bend. But life is full of edges. Sometimes it's hard to see what might happen next.
Which is another reason for this blog. Jeff and I are not exactly your typical mainstream bride and groom. We are pacifists, feminists and environmentalists. We are Pagans. And we are, as they say kindly, "creative types." We're a couple of weirdos, and we know it. And while this makes us practically perfect for each other — and quite cute as a couple, I like to think — we also know that we have family members and friends out there wondering, "What exactly is a pacifist, feminist, eco-friendly Pagan wedding going to look like, anyway? I'm not going to have to dance naked around a bonfire under a full moon chanting prayers to Gaia, am I?"
This blog is our answer to those uncertainties. (The short answer is, only if you want to!) We hope it will be a way of reassuring our loved ones, and inviting them into these wilder places on the edges of the normal. Let us begin with a picnic basket and a friendly wave. And who knows, maybe it'll provide a bit of inspiration for other couples out there, too, who want to know how they can plan a low-budget, eco-friendly, fringe-faith love-fest of their own.
If this blog project can offer a bit of guidance and hope, and maybe a laugh or a sigh once in a while, it will have served its purpose well.
That's a pretty good way to start a marriage, we think.
Welcome to Wedding on the Edge.
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